Education. While occupying this position he organized the first teachers' institutes held in America and edited the Connecticut Common School Journal. Rhode Island also owes a debt of gratitude to Barnard. The Connecticut Legislature in a moment of reaction abolished the Board of Education (or, as it was called, the Board of Commissioners of Common Schools) and thus Henry Barnard lost his position. Rhode Island seized the opportunity to obtain his services to organize its public schools. Repentant Connecticut soon recalled him to his old position but not before he had worked a revolution in the Rhode Island school system. Like Horace Mann, he spent some years in the Middle West. For two years he was Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin and, while there, did much to organize training for teachers throughout that State. After serving the cause of education in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Maryland, where he was President of St. John's College at Annapolis, Barnard became the first United States Commissioner of Education.

The great achievement of Henry Barnard, however, lay not in administration but in authorship. For more than thirty years he was editor of The American Journal of Education, which was really a

serial encyclopedia of educational theory and practice. In it were included a large proportion of the most important articles and monographs ever written about education. But the expense of the undertaking was so great that Barnard, after losing more than $40,000 on it, was compelled to abandon it, and the costly plates would have been melted into type metal if William T. Harris had not organized a corporation to save the series.

The work accomplished by Horace Mann in Massachusetts and by Henry Barnard in Connecticut and Rhode Island was typical of that done by hundreds of other men of the same generation who served the interests of education not as teachers but as the statesmen of the schools. It was an age when the expert, the superintendent, the administrator first found a distinctive place in the common task of combating ignorance. The individual commander, such as the college president or school principal, was now aided by a "general staff" or boards of education, school inspectors, and normal school directors. Many a small boy sitting in a bright, well-aired, warm room at his individual desk, with an attractively illustrated geography open before him, and pleasant memories of the school garden or the camera club in his

thoughts, owes the best features of his education not to his teacher but to some busy superintendent who could not have made a success in teaching even a district school but who could and did devote his life to perfecting the school system. The best of these men, however, like Horace Mann, never made the machinery of education an end in itself, but kept steadily in mind the boys and girls for whose benefit it was all called into being.

CHAPTER X

DE WITT CLINTON AND THE FREE SCHOOL

Ten years of the life of a child may now be spent in a common school. In two years the elements of instruction may be acquired and the remaining eight years must now be spent in repetition or idleness, unless the teachers of the common schools are competent to instruct in the higher branches of knowledge. The outlines of geography, algebra, mineralogy, agriculture, chemistry, mechanical philosophy, surveying, geometry, astronomy, political economy and ethics might be communicated by able preceptors without essential interference with the calls of domestic industry. — De Witt Clinton.

MASSACHUSETTS is typical of those States which, having a democratic system of public instruction, sought to make it efficient; New York is a good example of those States which, having a system of public instruction that recognized class distinctions, sought to make it democratic. In New England the chief battleground was the question of expert supervision over the district school; in the Middle Atlantic States and in some parts of the South the great issue was the abolition of the distinction between "pay" pupils and

those who, by a kind of charity, were given their tuition free.

Of course, the question of expert supervision has also been an important one in New York, but in one sense it may be said that the supervision was older than the schools. Nowhere in America had the Revolutionary War more thoroughly unsettled what little had been accomplished for the younger generation in colonial days. True public schools did not exist, although a few parish schools and academies had weathered the stormy time, and even King's College; with its honorable record of public service, was forced to close its doors for several years. The revival of education under the republic began at the top. In 1784 King's College was reopened under the name of Columbia and was made the center of a State educational system. Young De Witt Clinton was the first student matriculated in Columbia College, and he graduated in 1786 with the first class to receive degrees from the institution.

By the act of 1784 a “University of the State of New York" was created. This was not a university in the American sense of a single institution, but in the French sense of a governing body placed over all the colleges and schools that might be es